As fast as it comes down, graffiti returns to DC streets. Not all of it unwelcome

WASHINGTON — U Street is mostly deserted when Aceba Broadus and his three-person crew from the District of Columbia's Department of Public Works start setting up shop before 8 a.m. at one of D.C.'s perennial graffiti hot spots.

They tap a hydrant to fill the 275-gallon tank in their truck and get to work — coating graffiti-covered walls with a special chemical and then blasting them with high-pressure water. The work progresses quickly, but Broadus holds few illusions that their efforts will last long.

“Come back on Friday and it will be all retagged again,” he said on a Tuesday. “It's definitely a bit frustrating.”

Across town, Eric B. Ricks is engaged in his own graffiti project, far different from the tags and protest slogans often found on buildings and monuments across the nation's capital. Using a scissor lift, Ricks applies a coat of primer to the wall of Savoy Elementary School in preparation for what will become a city-sponsored mural of geometric patterns and multicolored birds.

“Graffiti is different for every practitioner of the craft. It’s like a hydra, this multiheaded thing that’s many things to many people,” said Ricks, a longtime graffiti artist. “Graffiti in its purest form is like a flower growing out of filth and muck.”

This eye-of-the-beholder dynamic between vandalism and urban art form has been a reality since the earliest days of graffiti. One person's artistic expression is another's problematic eyesore. At any given time, there are three DPW removal teams working, and the city budgets $550,000 per year for the task.

Those teams use a variety of methods, depending on the type of paint and material of the wall — limestone is the hardest to clean. Sometimes, they use gray paint to simply cover the graffiti on metal security doors. Some types of stone get a special chemical and the water hose. And occasionally, they need to call in outside contractors with a sandblaster.

The district also has to contend with political graffiti often left by the frequent mass protests that are drawn to the nation’s capital.

Most recently, the large July protest against the Israel-Gaza war peaked with a takeover of Columbus Circle in front of Union Station, the Amtrak and commuter rail station. The protesters left graffiti throughout the area, including on a replica of the Liberty Bell.

One protester sprayed pro-Hamas slogans on the statue of Christopher Columbus. That protest actually produced a rare graffiti-related arrest as authorities later charged a 20-year-old Maryland woman.

But mostly it's tagging, the distinctive stylized bubble-letter signatures that can be seen on hundreds of buildings and all along the Metro train lines.

A 21-year DPW veteran, Broadus has become intimately familiar with some of the regular taggers. Three different times, young graffiti artists have been sentenced to community service on his crew; he has occasionally tasked a tagger with covering over their own work.

“I ask them why they do it, and they usually say something like, ‘We want to promote our name,’” Broadus said with a shrug.

For Ricks, that inability to grasp the motivation has been there since the earliest days of the modern graffiti movement — something he tracks to the early 1980s in New York City. “Most people don’t understand why these kids are doing this,” he said. “Not everybody with a spray can has the same motivations and goals.”

Now 49, Ricks became entranced by graffiti shortly after his family moved from the African nation of Liberia to Hyattsville, Maryland, when he was 13. He speaks like an unofficial historian of the art form — tracing it to cave paintings, the depression-era “hobo code” that transients would use to communicate and the painted symbols that guided enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

“The urge to scribble and leave a mark somewhere is deep in the psyche of the human animal,” he said.

The local scene produced some homegrown graffiti stars like Cool “Disco” Dan, who scrawled his moniker hundreds of times across the city, and eventually received mainstream media writeups and became an icon of pre-gentrification Chocolate City.

The DPW crews almost exclusively work in response to requests from property owners, but their job changed dramatically during George Floyd protests in summer 2020 over police violence and historic racial iniquities. Several days of demonstrations near the White House devolved multiple times into mass vandalism throughout downtown.

Broadus recalls his crews "working 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., seven days a week” — often operating under police protection from protesters “who definitely would have tried to do some bodily harm to us.”

In true district fashion, the city with more than 20 separate police forces also houses multiple graffiti-removal crews. In addition to the DPW, the city's Department of General Services removes graffiti from city government buildings and schools.

The National Park Service handles anything on NPS land — which includes the Columbus Circle cleanup. And Metro has its own crews working along the train lines, while graffiti on federal government buildings is handled by the General Services Administration and the different federal landholding agencies.

Local efforts to honor and preserve D.C.'s graffiti history have been hit-and-miss. Longtime local artist Corey Stowers founded the 14th Street Graffiti Museum in 2020, in an unused open-air courtyard in the 16th Street Heights neighborhood. Stowers hoped to draw tourist buses and school field trips at $15 per ticket. But the museum struggled financially and is now mostly padlocked.

“There was just no funding. I couldn’t be there all the time and I couldn’t pay someone to be there,” said Stowers, who wants the D.C. government to do more to support the art form.

The city's primary official vehicle for supporting graffiti is the Murals D.C. program, which has sponsored 165 murals around the city and pays artists like Ricks between $30 and $40 per square foot for their work.

“In time, you can become as precise with a spray can as a surgeon with a scalpel,” Ricks said. “This thing is by the people for the people. You can't put it in a box.”